“As you can see,” Stuart said, “Reims was rather knocked about.”
“And the cathedral?”
“Quite the worse for wear, sir. Do you know it?”
“I haven’t seen it for many years.”
“We’ll have a look on our way out of town.”
The trip from Paris had been mostly unremarkable: fields, winter foliage, country lanes, towns huddled against the railroad siding. The war that had consumed the world and destroyed a generation seemed to have receded before them like a mist. But in Reims it was different.
Here it is, Maureen thought, as she looked out at the shattered streets. Here is the war. Stuart piloted the big touring car around the shell craters as they passed one ruined block after another, half the buildings, it seemed, roofless and empty.
“Good God,” she heard her father say as the car turned onto a central street and brought them in sight of the shattered cathedral. “Stop the car.”
Stuart pulled over on the torn-up square facing the cathedral’s facade. Hotels and government buildings on either side of the square were almost completely destroyed. The cathedral itself still stood, but the facade was blackened by fire, some of the carvings shorn away by blasts, the great rose window above the main doorway empty of its stained glass.
Gil got out of the car and Maureen followed him. He stared at the facade of the cathedral and then turned in a slow circle, taking in the destruction. When he spoke to Maureen, his voice was steady but his eyes were filmy.
“I came here once when I was a student,” he told her. “To see the carvings mostly. Just stood here and looked at them for hours. Feeling a kind of rapture, I suppose, as young people that age do.”
He did not say what else had contributed to that rapturous feeling—a young woman named Maryse who worked in one of the artists’ supply shops near the École. She had been a few years older than Gil, effortlessly slender, a small, watchful face under a towering crest of hair. Breezy and optimistic, she had disapproved of his solemn ambition, his sense that life was a forced march toward a fixed goal, and that an idle hour represented crucial ground lost. What was the point of being an American, she had asked him, if you don’t allow yourself the freedom that is your birthright?
She spoke a little English but they talked mostly in French, and though she held forward-thinking and even strident political views it was gossip that truly animated her. She had been for a time the mistress of one of his professors, and she was still fond of him and greatly amused when Gil told her about the man’s continuing helpless flirtations with students and shopgirls.
“You must take me to Reims,” she told Gil one day. “People tell me my portrait is there.”
He took her there. He did not think she looked at all like the famous smiling angel on the facade of the cathedral. The carved angel had a simpering, secretive expression, far from the open delight that animated Maryse’s face. But she was amused by the fact that people told her there was a resemblance, and at odd moments while they were in Reims she would do her best to mimic the angel’s mysterious and self-satisfied smile.
They had pooled their few spare francs for the train fare and a bare room in a small hotel off the rue Voltaire. They had hardly anything left over for food. They had no meals, just bread and cheese and a bottle or two of wine they had brought from Paris. He had meant to see everything, study everything, but he stayed in bed with her for most of the two days they were there, hungry, drowsy, drained of all earnest curiosity about the world.
On the second morning he left her sleeping and stood alone in front of the great cathedral, staring at the carvings on the western facade as the sun rose behind the twin bell towers. There were so many carvings of saints and angels and bishops and gargoyles, all of it so hectic and dense, that at first he had been repelled. It was too much art. But he made himself look at each portal, at the action represented: an infant Christ touching the forehead of a hermit, demons being cast out, heads being chopped off, the damned being led to hell, a multitude of seated figures with their hands raised in benediction. He was hungry for breakfast, hungry for the life to come, feeling as the sun rose that he was content and confirmed in his calling.
They had gone back to Paris and she had taken up with an ancient painter in his fifties with a spacious atelier. She had broken Gil’s heart so cleanly and sweetly he felt almost grateful. The loss of Maryse was another thrilling sensory deprivation that set him on a higher plane and led him deeper into his art.
He stood now staring at the facade of the cathedral, wondering if she was still alive, trying to picture her at sixty-three or sixty-four.
He thought he noticed something and walked closer, scanning the tight rows of saints and angels, some of them intact, some not, that were crowded above the doorways.
“If you’re looking for the smiling angel, sir,” Stuart said, “I’m sorry to say it was decapitated in the first bombardment, in ’fourteen. But they found the pieces of its head and it’ll be back together soon enough.”
Gil turned back to the empty plaza.
“There was a statue of Joan of Arc here.”
“She came through unscathed. They moved her before the worst of it started.”
“It was by Paul Dubois,” Gil explained to Maureen. “The Joan of Arc wasn’t his best work, in my opinion, but I’m happy to hear it’s survived.”
Gil walked into the cathedral and Maureen followed, passing below the gables and buttresses thick with their sculpted figures and on into the nave. The floor had not yet been cleared. There were still piles of rubble, some of it made up of fallen pieces of statuary. Light flooded in from the broken vault, and through the open roof far above they could see the winter clouds streaming by.
They walked solemnly through the vast space, down the aisles where great tapestries had once hung, past broken tombs and pulpits and burned walls. As they walked, Stuart narrated in a reverent whisper, telling them which damage had been rendered in which years of the war; the terrible bombardments of 1917 were the worst, he said, with shells raining down on the cathedral for seven hours without a letup, a sustained and targeted assault.
From the expression on her father’s face, from the way he nodded courteously but distractedly as Stuart kept up his monologue, Maureen thought she understood what was going through his mind. He was a monument maker confronted once again with the death of monuments, with the annihilating human contempt for what was supposed to be sacred and therefore safe.
For her part, Maureen was stirred by a sense of scale that was new to her. Her own unhappiness, her bitterness toward Vance, her anger at her father, were like some memory from another life. Nothing like that could register here. The cathedral was vast, but the destruction it pointed to had no limit. She had the sense that she and her father had left their world behind.
As they drove out of town Stuart continued his discreet narration: the German invasion, the French offensives that followed, Ludendorff’s desperate but failed counterattack, finally the great push that broke the German line that took place after the Americans arrived in the summer of 1918.
“I’m a bit of an amateur military historian,” he told them cheerfully. “Just off to the right, you see the great massif of Moronvilliers. Terrible fighting all along here. May I ask, sir, what brings you to Somme-Py?”
“We’ve come to locate a friend.”
“Ah, well, first we’ll have to locate the town, I’m afraid. Terrible fighting around there too, as you know. Somme-Py was one of the towns—a thousand of them altogether—that the Germans just wiped off the map. No place to stay there, of course. Nearest proper up-and-running hotel is in Verdun. I believe the company wired ahead for a reservation.”
Gil nodded. He stared out at what used to be the landscape: dead fields, dead forests, old women pushing wheelbarrows full of scavenged lumber and wire, families camped out in the cellars of houses that had been blown away down to their floors. Men were at work everywhere in the scattered villages t
hey passed, tearing down teetering walls, building back ancestral stone dwellings out of raw lumber. The dirt road was uneven and in places it simply disappeared, vanishing into massive shell craters that had not yet been filled. They swerved around the craters onto cropless fields, through rows of fruit trees with greasy black limbs, killed by fire or by poison gas. The winter sky was gray and the earth below was unnaturally devoid of color. The clothes of the people they passed were brown or black, or so old and worn that the color had faded into nothing. The only relief in this chromatic dead zone was the red roofs of the warehouses and dispensaries built by the French Red Cross.
The world they were driving through was sobering enough that even Stuart, their chatty, history-loving guide, finally gave up his commentary and fell into silence. They passed other cars going in the opposite direction, more war tourists with their Michelin guides to the battlefields and their box lunches, sightseers swarming over the vast open wound of the front.
He couldn’t be too hard on them, Gil thought. Their curiosity was no more naked than his own. Maybe some of them had come to see where their sons or brothers had fallen, to lay a wreath on the ravaged ground. He himself was coming against the wishes of a young man he had never met, but who might hold some secret that would allow him to begin anew the work he had abandoned.
In another hour and a half Stuart announced they were arriving at Somme-Py, the village where Arthur Fry had told them he was living. Where exactly the village was—or had been—was hard to reckon. There was nothing left of it but a few teetering walls that rose above the debris-strewn ground like hoodoos in a desert. Some people were squatting in the cellars of their vanished houses, others were in thrown-together shacks with corrugated metal roofs, others in neatly built wooden shelters. They stared blankly at the passengers in the touring car as it made its way to what Gil guessed had once been the center of town, a crossroad in front of an imposing municipal ruin.
“That’s the mairie,” Stuart said. “Of course it’s nothing now. The new one is just there.”
He pointed to a barnlike building made of new lumber twenty yards away, from which a young man in a kepi and blowsy blue coveralls was striding forward to greet them.
Maureen saw the man’s welcoming smile and asked herself: could it be Arthur? But almost as soon as the thought formed she knew to dismiss it. This young man’s face was whole, and though when he greeted them he spoke in courtly English he had a thick French accent.
“Welcome to Somme-Py. My name is André L’Huillier. You’re Americans?”
“Yes,” Gil said, returning his handshake, which in the French manner was brief and precise. “Francis Gilheaney. My daughter, Maureen.”
“Are you from New York? Are you friends of Harry Collins?”
“We’re from New York originally. At present we live in Texas. No, I’m afraid we don’t know Mr. Collins.”
A brief look of puzzlement crossed L’Huillier’s face. “Please forgive me for assuming. Monsieur Collins is Somme-Py’s great friend in the States. Last spring he was kind enough to host a fashion show there to raise money for our village. Several of his friends have come here to see the work for themselves.”
“We’re looking for Arthur Fry,” Maureen told him.
“Arthur Fry?” The puzzled look returned. “May I ask—are you his family?”
“No,” Maureen said. “Just friends. But we’ve come a long way to see him.”
“Well, of course you must see him then. We hold Arthur in very high regard, along with all Americans. He is a great friend to Somme-Py. But I must tell you, during the war he suffered an—”
“We know about that,” Gil said.
“Then let me take you to him. He’s in our temporary city hall at the moment. I’ve set him to work helping us sort out the town records. We were fortunate to save them from the devastation.”
They followed him into the wooden building, a drafty hall that looked more like a warehouse, with hundreds of boxes stacked against the walls and half a dozen young men—some dressed in coveralls like L’Huillier, others in threadbare suits—sorting through them.
“Supplies from America,” L’Huillier said to Gil and Maureen. “Clothing and blankets and saucepans, that sort of thing. All critically needed here, of course. When the Germans came our people had to leave with only what they could carry, and when they came back everything they had left behind was gone.”
He gestured to an open doorway cut into a plywood partition that served as an interior wall.
“Here you will find Arthur,” he said. He smiled again and discreetly withdrew to talk to some of the men cataloging the supplies. There was a stiffness in the man’s stride that Gil had not noticed before, and a palsied rigor in his upper back where part of his shoulder had been shot away.
Maureen touched her father’s arm as they were about to enter the room.
“I think I should see him alone. Just at first. Do you mind?”
“Why should I mind? Please go ahead.”
HE WAS sitting alone behind a desk. Like the building in which it sat, the desk was made of new lumber, a broad plank supported by sawhorses. His head was down, bent to the task of sorting his filing cards, and his concentration was deep enough that he did not look up when she entered the room. He wore the same coveralls as some of the other workers. His hair was sandy. When he lifted his head a bit and turned to sort through the filing box she saw his face. One side of it looked like something that had collapsed and then been awkwardly shored up, an assemblage of disproportionate planes that was only a rough structural approximation of the flesh and bone that had been blasted away.
He had not yet seen her; she still had the opportunity to silently withdraw without ever disturbing him. But instead she spoke his name.
He looked up at her and almost instantly shifted his head to the left, trying to hide his damaged face from this unexpected visitor.
“I’m sorry. I know you told me not to come.”
She took a step or two forward.
“I’m Maureen.”
He stood up politely, his hands at his sides, his face still turned away.
“Is it all right that I came? Please tell me if it’s not and I’ll go.”
“No, ma’am,” he said. “It’s all right, I guess.”
His voice was soft and slurry. The left side of his mouth was lipless and did not move when he spoke, though the joinery beneath the skin shifted in a way that was unsettling to see.
She walked up to him and offered her hand.
“I think we should say a proper hello.”
He was wearing a glove with the fingers cut away and he took it off to shake her hand, looking down as he did so.
“My father is outside. He’d like to meet you as well.”
“All right. I ought to finish this work, though.”
“Of course. The last thing we want to do is get in your way. Maybe we can have dinner together, after you’re off work. Are you angry with me, Arthur?”
“No, ma’am. I said I wasn’t.”
“Do me a favor, then. Call me Maureen instead of ma’am.” He nodded. She was about to go, but something else needed to be said.
“Please let’s not be shy with each other. I’ve seen your face now. That’s what you were afraid of, wasn’t it? Showing me your face?”
“I expect so. I don’t like it when people see me for the first time.”
“Well,” Maureen said, “the first time is over.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
They sent Stuart ahead to spend the night in Verdun. There were no accommodations in Somme-Py, but André L’Huillier, the young man who had greeted them on their arrival, had insisted it would be his great pleasure to set up cots for them in the temporary town hall, and to host them for dinner in the shell of his former home.
“I was born in this house,” L’Huillier declared as he poured the wine. They were seated at an Empire dining table, a proud piece of furniture half shattered by shrapnel. Crowded
together on mismatched chairs were Gil and Maureen and L’Huillier and his young wife and, looking uncomfortable, Arthur Fry. “Of course when I was born it actually was a house and not the ruin you see today. But there were two walls left standing after the war, and that by itself was something of a miracle.”
Candles burned on the table, and there was heat enough from the cookstove to make things reasonably comfortable, but the wind pressed against the canvas roof and vacant walls, and whistled wherever it managed to pass through the tied-down flaps. Madame L’Huillier had made a cassoulet, and Gil and Maureen had insisted on contributing to the meal with the baguettes and cheeses that Stuart had packed as a picnic lunch.
“This street was called rue du Clichet then,” L’Huillier said. “It is rue Foch now. The war took away everything, even the names of our streets.”
He raised his glass in a toast. “But tonight it has brought us new friends.”
He was inquisitive, courteous, generous, his good nature intact after somehow surviving the slaughter on Mort-Homme during the defense of Verdun. He spoke fluent English and graciously translated the conversation for his wife, who spoke only French and who seemed vaguely oppressed by her husband’s loquacious hospitality.
L’Huillier genially interrogated Gil on what had brought him and Maureen to Somme-Py, and when he heard the story of Lamar Clayton’s unusual commission he asked a dozen informed questions about the work of the sculptor and the complicated process for transforming a clay or wax original into bronze.
Gil answered his host’s inquiries as he glanced toward Arthur, sitting at the end of the table, carefully spooning cassoulet into the working side of his mouth, attentive but excruciatingly silent. Gil had not yet had the occasion to say more than a few words to him. As soon as Maureen had walked out of the mairie after meeting Arthur, L’Huillier had swiftly invited them all to dinner, which had necessitated a hurried logistical discussion with Stuart, who clearly had not relished spending the night in a bombed-out village when there was a warm bed waiting for him at a pension in Verdun.
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